


Oh The Sea

by rosymamacita



Series: Arcadia [10]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Bellarke, Canon Compliant, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, s3 after demons, they reach the sea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 11:41:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6656434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosymamacita/pseuds/rosymamacita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The adventure squad reaches the sea, and has to wait for the Boat People to show. Clarke wants to see the ocean, to go into the water. Bellamy indulges her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oh The Sea

It was a remarkably short journey to the sea with the Rover, and Lincoln’s journal indicated that the Boat People wouldn’t be around for a few days, living as they did, off of the cycles of the moon and the tides. So they sat and waited. They’d already checked out the area, and it was as safe as it could be. They were camping at night in the rover, taking turns on watch so it never got that crowded. But just waiting made Clarke antsy.

Clarke wanted to experience the thing that she had read about and seen in the old movies. The thing that they wrote poems about. She wanted to witness it for herself. Not from the shore line, where they’d scouted from before. She wanted to get in there. She wanted step in it, to feel it. To swim.

It was ridiculous. She didn’t even know how to swim, but the sound of the waves just over the rise was driving her insane. She needed to go into the sea.

Clarke stood up at the campfire. Bellamy, Jasper and Octavia looked up at her, expectantly. She felt a little silly. “Uh,” she said, not sure how to express the desire. “I’m going to go…” she said and paused. Bellamy raised his eyebrow at her and waited.

She scowled at him. “I want to go in the water,” she finally spit out, like a challenge. She watched the smile curl his lips, and a feeling between annoyance and desire thrilled through her. She narrowed her eyes at him. “I want to go in the water,” she repeated. Adamant. Damn his smirk. Laugh at her all he wanted. She wanted to step foot in the ocean. 

His smile spread. “Well then,” he said, and stood up next to her. “We should go in the water.” He looked over at Octavia and Jasper.

Jasper’s brows were drawn together. “I’ll stand watch,” he said. “You guys go.” He’d been silent since they left Arkadia, pretty much, but according to Bellamy, that was better than he’d been doing before.

“Octavia?” Bellamy asked.

She simply shook her head and continued to stare into the fire.

Bellamy sighed. “Okay, come on, Clarke. Let’s go for a swim. It’s not that warm, so maybe we should bring some blankets from the rover.” Clarke followed Bellamy to the rover. She liked that he was being so thoughtful. She really hadn’t planned that far ahead. All she wanted to do was go into the water. If it had been last month when she was all alone, she would have gone, without a plan, and shivered her way back to a blanket. If it had been five months ago, she would have argued against anyone going to the water at all because they had Work To Do.

Both Clarkes made her tired. Even in memory. 

Bellamy came out of the rover, handing her a blanket. They walked over the rise to the water, and stood there, the waves just lapping at their boots.

The sea was bigger than Clarke had thought it would be. She knew that it was big, that it covered 71% of the Earth. She had seen it from space. So she knew just exactly how big. 

She just hadn’t thought that it would feel so immense. That it would make her feel so small. It didn’t make sense because she had lived in space, and space was vastly larger than the sea, but space had never really felt big. It had felt confining. Space had been what kept them trapped inside the Ark.

But the sea. Oh, the sea. 

It was lovely. The soft blue-gray and the salt spray misted her face. The air was the freshest thing she could ever imagine.

“When we were living up there on the Ark,” Bellamy said, his deep voice harmonizing with the roar of the waves, “Did you ever imagine anything like this could even exist?”

Clarke breathed it in. “I think if I had known, I might have felt like we were being suffocated.”

Bellamy snorted. “We were.”

She looked at him and moved a step closer to him, smiling. “So, are you going in with me?”

He pressed his lips together and looked at her sternly. “Someone’s got to be on the look out for sea monsters.”

Clarke grinned and looked up at him through her eyelashes. “You’re the scariest thing out here.”

Bellamy laughed. “Not scarier than you.”

She couldn’t believe she was laughing about this. Maybe it was the sea air giving her a new lease on life, washing away her sins. 

“How about the two of us together. Now that’s scary.”

He rolled his eyes. She loved the curve to his lips as he smirked. She missed that.

“I’m going in,” she said, and pulled off her boots, throwing them up on shore away from the tide. She pulled off her jacket and dropped it with the blanket on the rocks. Then her shirt followed.

“Clarke,” Bellamy said, his voice just a little bit choked. 

She bit her lip and looked up at him. Her pants landed on the rocks, too. Clarke snickered at his blank face, and started towards the water in just her bra and underwear. “You coming?”

“I’m supposed to watch out for you.” His voice sounded slightly strangled.

“Bellamy,” Clarke said, and dipped a toe into the waves. “Oh!” She turned back to look at him watching her. “It’s cold.” He still stared. She sighed in exasperation. “Bellamy, no one is supposed to swim without a buddy. It’s like an ocean rule. You have to come in.“

She saw the deep shadows in his eyes as he looked her up and down. They gave her shivers. Or maybe it was the cold water on her toes. “You win,” he said and he dropped his jacket next to hers. His hands went to his shirt to pull it off and Clarke’s bravery suddenly failed her. 

She turned out to sea, looking at the horizon instead of Bellamy stripping behind her. “Hurry up, slow poke,” she called over her shoulder, trying to ignore the fine tremor in her voice. Or attribute it to the chilly water. “I’m going in deeper.”

She splashed through the waves intently, the cold rising up her body taking her mind off the nearly naked man following her. She was in past her waist when she heard him gasp.

She turned around and saw him, in just his briefs. His broad shoulders brown and smooth, tapering down to a flat belly, ridged with muscles and a narrow waist, strong legs. Clarke’s strength left her and she sank down into the water up to her neck. Luckily the salt water supported her weight and she just watched him. She’d known he had a good body, she could tell, but she was not aware that he’d look like this. 

“It’s really cold, Clarke. Aren’t you freezing out there?”

Clarke tried to speak and couldn’t. She cleared her throat. “It’s not as cold when you get used to it,” she said.

“Your voice is shaking,” he said.

“You just have to keep moving, Bellamy.” She said, pretending she was neither cold, nor reeling from his presence. “You should dive right in. Isn’t that why they say that?”

“You should come back in. You’re out too far. You can’t swim.”

“I’m not,” she said. And then found her footing and stood up again. Still only at her waist.

“It’s still too far. What if there are sea monsters.”

“What, sharks?” she teased.

“Sharks,” he said, and moved slowly through the water to her. “One of those river eels that got O. Jaha said half his party was eaten by a giant sea creature.”

“You’re just trying to scare me, Bellamy, bringing up Jaha,” she shouldn’t even joke about Jaha. Jaha had taken her mother and the whole of Arkadia, but somehow, that all seemed so distant, here, with the ocean swirling around her, the sea where life came from, holding her up and nothing else seemed to matter. Just the ocean.

And Bellamy, looking at her, with that smile on his face that she wanted to see more of.

“You should be scared. Radiation, Clarke. The ocean could be full of mutant sea monsters and we wouldn't know. We don’t know what’s swimming under the surface.” 

The water was up to his thighs now. It brought her eyes to the only part of him that was covered. 

She wanted him so badly, and it terrified her. With everything they had been through and everything they had lost. Just the thought of losing him made her heart stop.

Clarke ducked under the water, eyes closed. Feeling the currents pull on her limbs, letting it pull her deeper. It felt different under the water. It was cold, but being immersed, having the water caressing every part of her, it was wonderful. She felt a part this world, perhaps for the first time ever.

She was almost out of breath, ready to come up when she felt something grab her leg.

She shot up out of the water, screaming. “Bellamy!”

And then he was there, sweeping her up into his arms.

“There’s something in the water,” she panted, her breath still short.

She clung to him, her legs wrapped around him to keep away from whatever it was that had attacked her. His heart beat frantically against hers, as he searched the water for danger.

“Oh,” he said, and then he laughed. His body shook with laughter. It rumbled through him, deep and resonant. If she weren’t so terrified, she would be enjoying it. She couldn’t remember ever hearing him laugh like this.

“What?” she said. “Stop laughing.” She smacked his chest. “Stop.” He just kept laughing. “Something’s in the water. It could be a sea monster,” she said even though she knew that if Bellamy thought there was really something dangerous in the water, he wouldn’t be laughing. And she wanted to hear him laughing.

“Clarke,” he said, his laughter dying down. “It’s sea weed.”

Clarke looked at him, the way his eyes sparkled, the way he bit his lip to keep from grinning wider, which didn’t work. “No,” she said. It couldn’t be. It had tried to get her, it couldn’t be just sea weed.

He nodded and reached out, grabbing up a handful of vegetation and pulling it out of the water. It was big, and hung down with green-brown nodules, the fronds dripping water. 

“Sea weed? I was scared of sea weed?”

His eyes glistened and crinkled at her, his smile wide, his teeth showing.

Her heart stopped at the sight of his happiness.

She reached up and brushed his bottom lip with her thumb. “The next time I make a fool of myself, will you promise to smile this big again?”

His smile changed into something softer. “Oh, Clarke,” he said and brushed her dripping hair back from her face.

She realized that she was still pressed up against him, one arm around his shoulders while his arm held her tight, her legs wrapped around his waist. So much bare skin, cold and slippery, touching.

She cradled his face in her palm, looking into his eyes, deep and dark, and full of things moving below the surface. So alive. 

Yes.

She nodded. Yes, Bellamy. 

His smile fled, Clarke pressed her lips to his, lightly. They were warm, though the sea was cold. And soft. This made everything seem worth it. 

She pulled back to look at him, to see what he was thinking. If he wanted the same thing.

Bellamy’s eyes were half lidded, his lips fallen open. He looked at her as if she were making him drunk.

“Yes?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. Tangling his fingers in the hair at the nape of her neck, he pulled her mouth to his. He drank her hungrily, pulling her closer. He tasted of salt, and sadness, of loss.

“Bellamy” she whispered against his lips, as the waves broke around them. He tasted of light, and hope, of love. They clung to each other in the sea, despite all the struggles they had endured, all the hardships. They stood wrapped in each other’s arms, still, in that one moment, together.

The sea, though. The sea.


End file.
